Alice gets up in front of the class and starts her speech, but something's wrong. She looks distracted, and she can't seem to stand still. Her legs and hips gently sway from side to side and her knees turn inward. Soon Alice is drawing odd looks from her classmates as they start to realize what's wrong: Alice has gotta go! The situation grows tense as she slowly becomes more and more restless, but at last her speech is finished and she can dash from the classroom in search of some badly needed relief.

It's a dance of the ages, that sometimes subtle and sometimes blatant collection of movements intended to resist the body's natural urges and avoid a messy disaster. Most commonly observed with children or those experiencing a lengthy Potty Emergency that might just ultimately result in a Potty Failure. Like those two tropes, it is frequently Played for Laughs.

Examples:

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Advertising

Pull Ups had a commercial where kids do the Potty Dance (albeit not a dance meaning you need to go, but a dance about the potty). It has steps! You can visit their website to download the song.

In the commercial for cat litter, it showed cats doing the potty dance, a method of leaning forward on their hind legs with their paws on their crotches, occasionally hopping.◊

In Rainbow Dash vs the Toilet, which is a fanfiction of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic featuring the Mane Six and Luna as foals, Fluttershy does one of these at the end, while remarking that she "has to go potty really bad".

Another My Little Pony fanfiction set a year or two after Season Six when the Cake twins are about two called Pound and Pumpkin Cake's Adventures and Misadventures in Potty Training, Pumpkin does this in the chapter "Fluttershy and the Missing Potty" and later they both do this in the chapter "Two Foals, One Outhouse". Pound does this on a cloud in "The Great Cloud Flush".

There is a meme of Captain Kirk from Star Trek: The Original Series in a position which looks like this out of context. Spock is saying "Captain, if you need to go, go. Doing the pee-pee dance is not logical."

Theo's nappy was sitting on the stairs and the two of them walked up the stairs and picked it up. They went to see Theo as he stood near the gate doing a little dance. "You need to go toilet?" John asked him as he got a nod, "You don't need a nappy?" he got a vigorous shake of the head for that.

In Benefits of Old Laws Harry does the sitting-down version after Cormac McLaggen slips a dangerously-large amount of laxative into his morning pumpkin juice.

Bronson Pinchot does this in a film called Second Sight, except it's an extremely elaborate dance they call the peepee dance. He plays a psychic who is channeling someone else who has to pee.

Mentioned in The Great Muppet Caper; Kermit, Fozzie and Gonzo are developing pictures to catch a jewel thief, but they do it in the Happiness Hotel's only restroom. As Pops says, "Catch him in another room! We got people dancin' up an' down on one leg out here!"

An outtake exists from an Abbott and Costello film of Costello stopping a take by doing the dance because he had to pee.

In this 2004 German Made-for-TV MoviePrinzessin Macht Blau, the titular character does the jiggling-up-and-down variation of this trope.

Literature

According to Robert Parrish's autobiography (he was one of the Little Rascals), they called this a European, or You're a'-Peein'.

Fregly in Diary of a Wimpy Kid reportedly does this while screaming "JUICE!! JUUUUIIIICE!!!!" as part of his bizarre use of slang.

When Rowley is having a Potty Emergency while trick-or-treating, Greg draws him doing this.

When Greg has a potty emergency in The Long Haul, he interprets his pig's circling motions as him also needing to go.

In Men at Arms, the corrupt and bullying Captain Quirke kicks Gaspode The Wonder Dog. Gaspode, a dog capable of human-level speech, gets revenge by planting the suggestion in Quirke's mind that he really, desperately, needs to go to the privy. Right now. note Because nobody believes a dog can speak, Quirke thinks the prompts he can hear are coming from his own mind, and responds accordingly Quirke's speech of gloating triumph to the seemingly defeated heroes is deflated by his doing the Potty Dance while he tries to gloat. Eventually, he gives up and runs for it.

A young prince does this in the children's book Prince Farfenugen and the Potty Dance.

In Horatio Hornblower novel The Commodore, Hornblower desperately needs to escape a reception line at an imperial dinner because he's realized the Finnish translator provided to him plans to assassinate the Czar (using pistols stolen from Hornblower) and provides "the only excuse he could think of" to the master of ceremonies to get away. Though that excuse is not explicitly named, that Hornblower hopping from one foot to the other in his haste adds to the effect makes it pretty clear.

Live Action Television

The Love Boat: Isaac does this when forced to share a cabin (and a bathroom) with the other male crew.

In The Revenge Files Of Alistair Fury a boy does this whilst waiting outside the toilet while Alistair and his friends are holding a meeting inside it. (He doesn't make it).

Spoofed in Malcolm in the Middle where Dewey's way of charming their babysitter is to bounce up and down singing "Poopy poopy poopy" over and over.

In the Unfabulous episode "The Road Trip" Addie is going through her flashbacks of her dad talking about the car, sports show. The last one shows her dad singing from behind the bathroom door, and Addie is squirming while having a potty emergency. He continues to sing as she waits impatiently in agony desperately waiting for the restroom.

The MythBusters tested whether this method was more or less effective at staving off the inevitable, with inconclusive results. It works for some people, but not for others, depending on invidual biologies.

Inverted in Tour of Duty. One of the soldiers is suffering from the runs, and has to keep going off into the bushes while on patrol to drop his pants. While he does so, a huge toad jumps onto his dropped pants. At the same time, he happens to see some Vietcong slipping out of a tunnel to evade the American soldiers; the soldier quickly yanks up his pants and Hilarity Ensues.

Bear in the Big Blue House: Tutter does in the book version of "When You've Got To Go." The book even describes him as "dancing from side to side."

Songs

A children's songwriter named Judy Pancoast wrote a song called The Potty Dance, which is about a school child who is doing this while having trouble paying attention at school, after drinking a lot of milk and water. It is described in the intro as "swinging your hips from side to side, hopping up and down, knocking your knees together and looking really uncomfortable".

A song on YouTube, entitled the Pee Pee Song, goes "I really have to go pee. I'm doing the pee-pee dance." as part of its lyrics.

In the song My Willy Won't Go by a person known as Koit who does Toilet Humor songs, the protagonist is seen doing this at the end while queueing at the toilet stall.

I Need to Pee, which is a song parodying The Little Mermaid's Under the Sea, has the line "I do this crazy dance or else I'm gonna wet my pants."

Video Games

The Sims: Sims do this and yell at the player to get their attention so the player can direct them to the restroom.

In RollerCoaster Tycoon 1 & 2, park guests with a high enough bathroom score change their normal walking animation into a frenetic one of these, particularly if your park's bathrooms are poorly placed or if you're evil enough to charge to use the bathroom. In Roller Coaster Tycoon 3, the park guests do this when their Toilet meter is high.

In the Tamagotchi PC Pack game, all the Tamagotchi except for Kuchipatchi and Ichigotchi do this when you say the command "Use the bathroom" through the microphone.

Final Fantasy VII features in NPC at the Wall Market bar doing one of these while waiting for a sick bar patron to finish up.

A special Bad Moon adventure in Kingdom of Loathing parodies Nobody Poops by having your character suddenly realize that you've never emptied your bladder, ever. The resulting effect increases item drops, because dancing always increases item drops in this game.

An app designed to help toilet train children has the protagonists do this while saying "I really have to go".

Visual Novels

Early on in ClockUp's Euphoria, Rika does the skirt-grab variant of this trope.

In Lovely Day of Girlfriends & Me, Yuka does the skirt-grab variant of this while on a date with Shou, before finally just going on the ground.

In The Penguins of Madagascar, Mort does it in in "Friend In A Box" after drinking a lot of lemonade given to him by Kowalski and Julien. Julien remarks that he never learned "that dance." Being the king, he just goes wherever he is. Kowalski takes two steps away from Julien upon hearing that.

In the Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated episode "The Secret Serum", the whole gang fakes a Potty Emergency and decides to make it more convincing by Potty Dancing. note The person might wonder why they were fine five seconds ago and it's urgent now

In the episode of What's with Andy?, Andy has a Potty Emergency and lampshades his Potty Dancing by saying and daydreaming "Hold it in, do a dance, that's the way to keep dry pants".

Chuckie does this at the end of the Rugrats episode "A Dose of Dil", and again at the beginning of "Potty-Training Spike".

In the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "SpongeBob vs. The Patty Gadget'' Patrick is not celebrating SpongeBob's victory over the Patty Gadget because he has to go to the bathroom, and is visibly doing a potty dance.

In the Fairly Oddparents episode "Crime Wave" Mom and Dad decide to have a prune juice drinking contest after they lock Timmy in the bathroom to force him to take a bath. Towards the end of the episode they are both doing a potty dance as they try to get back in.

There's an old joke saying that tapdancing was invented by a man called Stepan Stepanovich who was inspired by the unusual dances his family performed every time he occupied the toilet for too long.

Two toilet signs in a building in New Zealand depict this.

A How-to YouTube channel maker has a video called "How to Do the Need to Pee Dance", which has two professional dancers called Adrianne and Zach relaying the scientific theories on why some humans do this and doing a version that would be the most effective to this theory. They then combined the theories to create the "Ultimate Need to Pee Dance". It really looked like a dance!

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